The House of Dead Maids (8 page)

“You damned witch!” he shrieked. “Why, I’ll watch you die right now!” And from within the room came the sound of crashing furniture. I did not stay to listen while they killed each other, but ran away in fright.

Himself stood in the doorway of a handsome dining room, with Chinese plates and crystal glasses set upon the table, and tapers shining in the brackets. Mrs. Sexton brought a tureen from the kitchen, and I turned to help her. He stood by to watch us work, like proper gentry.

“Well?” he asked when he saw me alone.

“I couldn’t disturb them,” I said.

Mrs. Sexton looked me over, and she must have guessed what had occurred. “I’ll disturb them,” she said grimly.

She soon returned with the unholy pair. Their eyes were flashing, and their color was high, and not a word did they say while we sat on padded chairs and Mrs. Sexton served the soup. But after supper was over and Mr. Ketch had stormed off to
cool his temper in some other corner of the house, Miss Winter sipped wine by the fireside quite peacefully and watched the two of us play.

“What do you have there?” she asked Himself.

Now, I had had the good sense to leave Alma Augusta in the kitchen, but Himself was playing with the other wax doll right in front of her. He trotted over and showed her his plaything, bristling with pins and scars.

“He’s a pirate,” proclaimed Himself.

To my surprise, Miss Winter smiled, and she seemed a whole person just then, not two darting eyes behind a white mask. “He certainly is,” she agreed. “A most selfish and conceited pirate. Be sure to play rough with him, won’t you?”

Seeing himself succeed at giving orders made me bold to try. That evening, while Mrs. Sexton ran the warming pan under our sheets and Himself employed a feather as a plank to save his pirate from drowning in the washbowl, I carried a chair over to the shrouded mirror to lift the pillowcase away. As I reached for it, I saw a movement in the glass beneath the cloth: my own movement to uncover it, no doubt. But it startled me, and I decided to try my luck at assigning the task to another.

“Mrs. Sexton,” I said as she gathered her things and prepared to leave for the night. “I don’t believe you’ve noticed, but a cloth is blocking the mirror.”

“Aye, it is,” she grunted. And before I could say another word, she had gone and locked the door. That ended my attempt at a lady’s graces, and the mirror stayed as it was.

Himself dropped off like a lamb with Rogue tucked in the crook of his arm, and how that injured figure had managed to survive the day was more than I could account for. But I had asked Mrs. Sexton to leave us a candle, and I used its light to sew by, sitting up in bed and working on Alma Augusta’s pretty dress until I had it complete.

A humming caught my notice, as of an insect that had been but half crushed, so that life still stirred. I sought the offending creature to end both life and noise, but I could find nothing; it seemed to move about the room and got the better of me. I concluded that the candlelight had awakened it to a false day, but that night would restore its rest, so I blew out the candle and climbed into bed.

Two white eyes stabbed the darkness in the corner by the clothes press. I lay in terror and watched as they prowled the little chamber, and
where they moved, the humming went with them. At the same time, an odor suffused the room, as of putrid, maggot-riddled flesh.

I squeezed my eyes shut and lay as still as a statue then, but the aura of evil that traveled wherever the specter moved assaulted my senses like a visible form. The darkness that hid under the skin of my dead maid appeared here naked and virulent, like a tumor grown so fat that it had corrupted the healthy tissue and consumed the entire body.

The hum drew near, next to my pillow, and the foul odor made me retch. Beside me, Himself awoke.

“Go away!” he cried. “My pirate’s going to carve you up, you nasty strip of horsemeat!” The humming receded at his words, and the stench began to fade.

“Is that your ghost?” I whispered, unwilling still to open my eyes.

“The dead master with the eyes like windows,” he confirmed, stretching. “Much good it does him to curse me—he hasn’t hands to throttle me with.”

“I like my ghost better,” I said, shivering, and it was a long time before I could sleep.

The next day dawned sunny, with a riot of birdsong, and Mrs. Sexton turned us out of the house with our dinner in a napkin, saying she had work to do. As we walked through the kitchen garden, Arnby
came whistling around the corner of the house, carrying a bucket and brush.

“At last we’ve got springtime, thanks to the two of you,” he announced cheerfully. “You’ve made this old land bloom again with your bright young faces: she’s shaking off her age and bad humor. Tomorrow’s May Day, she’ll be young again like you, and then the luck’ll come back to this house.”

“What luck?” asked Himself, propping his pirate close so the little doll could hear.

Arnby set his bucket down on top of the low stone wall. “Oh, gambler’s luck, I guess you’d call it, young sir. The master of Seldom House rarely loses a wager. And then there’s the luck of the land, with full harvests and fine weather. We can’t have that for nothing, you know.” He caught my eye and laughed. “But I’d better hush my talk, or the little maidie will call me a superstitious old fool. If you’re wishing to ramble, stay on the slope above the house where you see the sheep grazing. Don’t go downhill or around to the other side, the path’s slick with mud, and all the rain has filled the bogs to bursting.”

We took his advice and climbed into the pasture, the lambs stopping their play to watch us go by and the birds flying up from the grass at our feet. There I sat and stitched Alma Augusta’s petticoat,
with the sun warming me and my hair blowing into my face, while Himself ran and shouted and called me at least a dozen times to help him find his pirate.

“He’ll be eaten if you don’t take care,” I warned. “Just you wait till a sheep finds him first.”

“Rogue will run the sheep through with his arrows,” he countered, and I owned that the creature would probably regret the meal.

At length, Himself grew impatient with my sewing and teased me to join him in his play, and we resolved to climb the ridge to its highest point. “What shall we find there, do you think?” he asked excitedly, running races with himself while I labored up the steep slope.

“More of what we see already” was my sensible reply when I had breath to spare for it. Then the slope became easier, and then it became level ground, and the wind met us with a great rush.

On the other side of the ridge, green crests of hills tumbled away into the distance like so many moss-covered cobblestones, mottled here and there with rusty turf or patches of purple heather. Black rain clouds massed in the west, but the morning sun lit the moorland so that it glowed beneath those charcoal clouds as brightly as a jewel. Turning around to look east, we saw a hazy golden sky and
the shining disk of the sun shedding its beams over a great tousled counterpane of green and brown. We could see the slate roof of Seldom House down below, but the village and the watercourse at its foot were hidden in shadow.

“At my other houses,” I said, “they built fences everywhere, until the land looked like it was caught in a net. Here, I can’t see a fence except for the ones by the house. The land here is still free.”

The wind buffeted us so that I made Himself take my hand to keep him from rolling off the ridge. We walked back a short distance and took shelter at the base of a little white cliff to eat our dinner. The sun slanted down on us, and the wind passed roaring over our heads, a clean, wholesome sound.

Himself had chased a field mouse into a hole. “First, we’ll cut off your nose, and then your ears,” his pirate Rogue told it. The mouse prudently remained hidden.

“Let it alone,” I said. “You shouldn’t make sport of God’s creatures. Nose and ears, indeed! Did they crop mice where you lived before?”

“No, they cropped people.” He set a morsel of bread down on a stone by the mouse’s hole and watched like a cat for it to emerge.

“What, people with no noses? With their ears
cropped? How disgusting! I can’t believe you’ve witnessed such deformities.”

He looked up at me, surprised, and I saw that he had indeed witnessed these things—witnessed, and very likely cheered. There was a savage innocence in his gaze, an indifference to the very notion of suffering. I felt my blood run cold at it. No little child should look so.

“Where do you come from?” I wondered.

He poked a grass stem down the mouse hole. “From hell.”

“Don’t be a fool! People don’t live in hell.”

“I did. Look, there’s someone on my roof.”

Seldom House did not lie directly below us, being on a knob of land that stood out from the slope of the ridge. From our vantage, the distant roof appeared to be a tilted square, forested with pale chimney pipes and broken into many smaller surfaces that rose to ridgelines and met one another at valleys as they accommodated the gables and dormer windows. Against the dark gray roof slates, the tiny figure of a man in a white shirt stood out clearly. As we watched, the figure shortened by degrees and disappeared.

“Who was he?” asked Himself, shading his eyes
with his hand. “He has to come back, doesn’t he? He can’t climb down a chimney.”

“Let’s take a better look,” I suggested.

We hurried down the slope, an activity as challenging as its ascent. The closer we came, the more difficulty I had interpreting the pitches and angles of the roof. Surely its center should not be a valley. Surely it should be the highest peak of all. And yet ridgelines and gables rose up before it, and it sank further from view.

An outcrop of rock afforded us the most advantageous prospect. Himself clambered onto it, and I crept out after him as far as I thought wise. The house was only a few hundred feet below us now, and I could make out faint lines that marked the edges of the slates.

“I think there’s a courtyard beyond this side of the house,” I said. “It’s hard to be sure, but I think I can just make out a hint of it there; that part’s tiled like the roof, but you can see it’s actually the top of a wall. A little courtyard. It must lie at the back of the topiary garden. I suppose it’s there to bring light into the house, but I can’t recall a single window that opens onto it.”

“He got off the roof, then,” said Himself,
disappointed. “I wanted to catch him crawling down a drainpipe.”

I made my charge come off the exposed rock before a gust of wind could knock him from his perch, and then we scrambled around its base. A familiar figure waited for us there.

Sunlight did nothing for the dead maid but reveal the worm holes in her dress. It could not drive out the darkness that filled her empty sockets—the darkness that seemed to fill her. But now I knew her name and her relationship to me. Perverted as she was from her true form, yet perhaps she had a claim to compassion.

“Who’s the pretty jenny?” asked Himself, and such was my state of mind that I did not think his comment strange.

“Walk on,” I told him with as much of calm as I could muster. “I’ll follow directly.”

He trotted along, and I waited until he was out of hearing, struggling with myself all the while. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Was not this dead thing evil?

“Izzy,” I whispered. The mute form swayed towards me at the sound of her name, and I stepped back, fighting revulsion. “Izzy,” I said again, “why do you walk? What do you wish me to know?”

The dead maid’s face never changed, but a pallid arm extended, the skin decorated with patches of fuzzy mold. The slender fingers pointed, so close I could see their yellow nails, at some unseen object behind me. Hair prickling on the back of my neck, I turned.

As still as portraits, they stood in that sunlit pasture, an abomination to all things living: dozens, quite close to me, black dresses rotted and black sockets stark, a company of dead maids. It did not matter that some looked old and others very young, some tiny and others fat. These were differences in disguise, variety of costume, with no connection to the essence of their being. What that essence was could only be felt: a presence not human, not animal—a single mindless, ravenous presence that fed on decay. Only their gray skin, wetly gleaming, shiny as slugs, shielded me from the horror of what lay within them.